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Battlestar Galactica

The better faster than light travel works, the less you can do with it in fiction. Want to rescue a spaceship falling into a star or a planet’s atmosphere? If you’ve got amazing FTL that can pop you over, then pop you and the other ship right back over, there’s no tension. If your FTL has perfect accuracy over incredible distances, just strap it to some missiles, win every battle before it begins. If it can take you anywhere in the universe without fail, what are the chances of getting stranded in deep space?

Methods of travel shape the story around them. This isn’t particularly revelatory. Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express, Snakes on A Plane, and countless other works of fiction all trap characters in a small enclosed traveling vehicle to help establish suspension of disbelief for fantastic plots (a variant of the locked room mystery). Many other stories force characters to race against the clock, making the method of transportation absolutely central to the story. Countless other examples present themselves. Faster than light travel, though, is particularly interesting. It’s quite simple to make it resemble any other type of transportation already existing in stories. Timothy Zahn’s Night Train to Rigel series even manages to replicate trains in space. FTL is also just much cooler than other forms of transit.

So have you ever encountered a faster than light drive in fiction that CAN’T be used in or near a gravity well, at least without serious consequences? A good example of this is Halo 2. A Covenant ship jumps inside Earth’s gravity well/ atmosphere, causes a huge explosion. Other examples of this include the StarDrive universe, the Tom Swift III universe (I think, haven’t read those books since I was a little kid), and a number of others. There is a good reason for this: awesome space battles.(more…)